“Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants every year, with more than 70 percent coming to the country through the process known as “chain migration” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an UNLIMITED relatives to the U.S. In the next 20 years, the current U.S. legal immigration system is on track to import 15 million new foreign-born voters. Between 7 and 8 million of those foreign-born will arrive in the U.S. through chain migration.” JOHN BINDER

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

The 115th US Congress assembles in Washington
today, with the ceremonial swearing in of new senators by outgoing Vice
President Joe Biden, and the swearing in of the entire House of Representatives
by House Speaker Paul Ryan. For the first time in a decade, the Republican
Party will be in control of the House and Senate alongside a Republican
president, Donald Trump, set to be inaugurated January 20.

The new government being formed in the US
capital is like nothing that has ever been seen in Washington. It carries the
reactionary policies of the Obama administration and previous Congresses,
whether under Democratic or Republican control, to new political depths.

The incoming Congress, working with the Trump
administration, is preparing an assault on whatever remains of social programs
implemented under the New Deal and the Great Society. The true content of
Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” is to roll back social conditions
for the working class to those that existed at the end of the 19th century--the
era of child labor, unlimited working hours and robber barons.

Entire federal departments such as Education,
Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services and the
Environmental Protection Agency have been turned over to right-wing ideologues
committed to scrapping all restraints on business operations and ending all
protections for workers, consumers and those who need social services.

Trump set the tone for the week at a New Year’s
Eve party at his luxury estate at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, where he
toasted his well-heeled guests with the promise that the new Trump
administration would “lower your taxes, cut regulations and repeal Obamacare,”
to thunderous applause.

The taxes to be lowered will be those of the
super-rich. The regulations to be abolished are those that restrict in any way
the operations of big business and the financial swindling of Wall Street, at
the expense of working people.

In calling for a repeal of Obamacare, Trump is
demagogically appealing to broadly felt popular opposition to the program,
which is seen as a boondoggle for health insurance companies, pharmaceutical
conglomerates and giant hospital chains. But the actual content of his
proposals will be to slash subsidies included in Obamacare as sweeteners while
using revisions of the program to make substantial inroads into Medicare and
Medicaid, the health insurance programs for the elderly, disabled and poor.

Despite Trump’s promises during the election
campaign to replace Obamacare’s hated “individual mandate” and provisions that
limit the choice of doctors and hospitals with “something great,” there is not
the slightest effort in that direction. On the contrary, the
Republican-controlled Congress will make the repeal of Obamacare the starting
point for moves to privatize Medicaid, Medicare, the Children’s Health
Insurance Program and other federal healthcare programs.

According to press reports Monday, the
congressional Republican leadership plans to make repeal of Obamacare the first
legislative action of the new session of Congress, although the timing is still
uncertain because of the complexities of the law, enacted in 2010.

Obedient to the financial interests involved,
the House and Senate Republican leaders aim to repeal Obamacare in a way that
does not damage the profits that corporations have begun to reap from the
program. This likely means that repeal of the individual mandate, which compels
millions to buy private insurance or pay an increasingly stiff tax penalty,
will be pushed back, lest it abruptly deprive the insurance companies of paying
customers.

The planned repeal of Obamacare will proceed in
several stages, beginning with passage of a budget resolution that will include
so-called “reconciliation” rules that require only a 51-vote majority in the
Senate, rather than the 60 votes required to overcome the expected Democratic
filibuster.

Because the reconciliation process is limited to
fiscal provisions that impact the budget, the actual dismantling of
healthcare.gov and the federal exchange through which more than 10 million
people have purchased insurance will require winning the support of at least
eight Senate Democrats. The same procedure applies to rolling back the
expansion of Medicaid, which extended the federal health insurance program for
the poor to an additional 10 million lower-income working class families.

Congressional Republicans have vowed to combine
Obamacare repeal with far-reaching attacks on both Medicaid and Medicare. Vice
President Mike Pence is a leading advocate of destroying Medicaid as an
entitlement program--one for which people are automatically eligible based on
their income--and transforming it into a block grant to the states. This would
limit the program in each state to the amount of the block grant, regardless of
the number of people who apply for aid, forcing states to set up increasingly
restrictive systems to ration assistance.

As for Medicare, Obamacare was actually financed
in part by cuts in the program’s reimbursements to hospitals and other
providers, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. These funds, if
recaptured through Obamacare repeal, will not be returned to Medicare, but will
be made available instead for the real priorities of the Trump administration,
increased military spending and a huge tax cut for the wealthy.

Trump’s appointment of Representative Tom Price
to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers Medicare
and Social Security, was a clear signal that he has discarded his campaign
promise that there would be no cuts in either of these critical federal
programs, which underwrite health care and retirement income for more than 70
million elderly and retired workers.

Price and House Speaker Paul Ryan have long
advocated privatization of Medicare, transforming it into a voucher system
modeled on the Medical Savings Accounts used by corporate employers to put a
lid on healthcare spending by their employees.

The other major legislative initiative—and the
one that has attracted the greatest attention from corporate lobbyists and Wall
Street—is the gigantic tax-cutting package, likely to be the largest in
history, exceeding even the windfalls for the wealthy enacted under Ronald
Reagan and George W. Bush.

Trump has promised to slash the corporate tax
rate from the present (largely nominal) rate of 25 percent to only 10 percent,
as well as cutting higher-end individual tax rates and abolishing the estate
tax, paid only by a tiny fraction of extremely wealthy families—those like
Trump himself, and his cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires.

A reactionary provision expected to be
incorporated either into the Obamacare repeal or the budget and tax legislation
is an outright ban on any federal funds going to Planned Parenthood, which
provides health services, including cancer screening, contraception and
abortion, to millions of working class women. The organization has been
targeted by the Christian fundamentalist right because it is one of the few
providers of abortion services in many states, and because it aggressively
defends women’s rights to the full range of family planning services.

While the Trump administration and the
congressional Republicans prepare an unprecedented onslaught against social
programs for working people, the Democratic Party is engaged in cynical
posturing to give itself a political cover for its inevitable capitulation to
the demands of Wall Street and the financial oligarchy.

The incoming leader of the Senate Democrats,
Charles Schumer, declared that the Democrats would fight “tooth and nail”
against the overhaul of Medicare, carefully avoiding any such pledge in
relation to Medicaid, the more immediate target.

Schumer, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and
2016 presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter to congressional
Democrats calling for a “day of action” on January 15 “to vigorously oppose the
Republican plan to end Medicare as we know it and throw our health care system
into chaos.” Again, the Democratic politicians are deliberately downplaying of
the attack on Medicaid.

Sanders has played a particularly rotten and
demagogic role, issuing a series of appeals to Trump to “keep your promise”
made during the campaign not to cut Medicare and Social Security.

Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the
Democratic National Committee, made her own appeal to Trump, saying that he had
an “enormous” opportunity to obtain Democratic support, and urging him “to show
that he’s eager to find common ground, to meet with Democrats.”

None of these Democratic leaders will state the
obvious—that Trump cares nothing for his campaign promises and is carrying out
the program of the financial aristocracy, which seeks to plunder the resources
of the federal Treasury to enrich themselves while building up the police and
the military to lay waste to enemies both foreign and domestic. That is because
the Democrats serve that same financial aristocracy and in many cases are
charter members of it.

Genuine resistance to the program of Trump, the
Republicans and Wall Street will come only from the working class, from the
great majority of the American people, who were ignored, betrayed or misled in
the course of the 2016 election campaign and now face an attack on their jobs,
living standards, social benefits and democratic rights on a scale that has no
parallel in history.